You are invited to submit full journal papers to the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media (IJPADM) for a special issue on Mixed Reality and Performance. Mixed Reality performances have highlighted our ability to: exist, understand and concurrently engage with both virtual and real worlds in a performative way. The development of the technologies under-pinning such Mixed Reality systems have afforded performers, directors and developers the chance to create experiences that can both spatially and temporally explore the boundaries of performance and understand where and why performance occurs in everyday life. These experiences can exist in a multitude of realities, that not only blur the boundary between the real and the virtual, but also re-define the distinction between the roles of audience and performer, creating new audience/performer-based paradigms. Read more on Call: Mixed Reality and Performance special issue of International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media…

Have you taught others (students, clients, members of the public) about telepresence?

The International Society for Presence Research (ISPR; https://smcsites.com/ispr) is compiling materials related to teaching telepresence for possible inclusion on its web site as a service to the academic and professional presence community.

When Glenn Harrington donned a motion capture suit complete with more than 40 reflective spheres he wasn’t being turned into the latest video game character, but helping to design car manufacturing jobs that are less physically stressful on workers.

At the Ford Motor Company Assembly Ergonomics Lab in Dearborn, Michigan, the company uses technology typically found in the gaming industry to reduce on-the-job and repetitive stress injuries on its assembly lines.

“The cameras pick up the markers [on the suit] and create an avatar,” said Harrington, a technical specialist in the Ford Assembly Ergonomics Lab. “What we’re ultimately trying to do is confirm the assembly feasibility of the vehicle.”

During a demonstration Harrington stood in the middle of a room with more than a dozen cameras pointed toward him, shining a dull red light. The light reflected off the markers, which were positioned all over his body, got captured by the cameras and then were processed by computer software that created an avatar called Jack or Jill. The company can scale the avatars from a short female to a very tall male to make sure that all of the jobs on the assembly line can be done by people of varying statures. Read more on Ford assembly line optimized by gaming technology…

Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds (ISSN: 1757191X; print on demand and online) is seeking contributions to its 3(1) issue (spring 2011). Papers from all areas associated with video/computer games and virtual environments are welcome.

Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in their dreams, LiveScience has learned.

That ability to shape the alternate reality of dream worlds might not match mind-bending Hollywood films such as “The Matrix,” but it could provide an edge when fighting nightmares or even mental trauma.

Dreams and video games both represent alternate realities, according to Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. But she pointed out that dreams arise biologically from the human mind, while video games are technologically driven by computers and gaming consoles.

“If you’re spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it’s practice,” said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. “Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.” Read more on Video gamers can control dreams, study suggests…

[From Fierce ContentManagement (“a weekly content management news update, which focuses on best practices for creating, storing and managing documents and information”); a scene from the film is here]

What if content management were 3D?

February 22, 2010 — 4:17pm ET | By Ron Miller

I recently saw the Michael Douglas/Demi Moore 1994 movie called “Disclosure.” In the movie (which explores sexual harassment in the workplace), Michael Douglas was working for a computer company that created a 3D virtual reality database. The user would put on special glasses and he was literally inside the database with the data. He could walk inside a library of content, interact with it and touch it.

I had coffee this week with Maria Korolov who writes extensively about virtual reality. During our conversation, I began thinking about what it would be like if someone designed a content management system in three dimensions. Think about how useful it would be to get all your company’s content laid out in front of you in a graphical view in which you could literally walk inside the system. Read more on What if content management were 3D?…

An opportunity for a strong Human Factors researcher with a background in HCI to develop a series of participatory design tools that will allow the integration of ethical and social considerations in monitoring technologies.